One of my favorite bloggers recently told me that he loved The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) so much that he didn't want it to come to an end--a point he proved by stopping 30 pages short of the finish line only to read it again from about the middle of the book on! While I didn't have quite that extreme a reaction, I understand the sentiment. Although Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del Chivo) is probably flashier than The War of the End of the World in regards to its use of storytelling tricks (multiple first-person narrators, temporal perspectives, etc.), I enjoyed this work more for its story itself: an epic fictionalization of the young Brazilian republic's brutal putdown of a millenarian revolt in Canudos in the state of Bahía in 1896-1897. To help explain the novel's grip on my imagination, I should note that this wasn't just any war that Vargas Llosa took on for his subject matter. The besieged, mostly-illiterate villagers who squared off against the government were a people apart both for their extreme poverty and their fanatic devotion to one Antônio Conselheiro (below), an itinerant mystic who viewed the new republican government as a threat to Christianity, as promoters of a return to slavery, and as agents of the Antichrist. Against all odds, the surreal mix of ex-bandits, social outcasts, and religious ascetics that surrounded "the Counselor" stood up against the army in four increasingly violent confrontations waged with apocalyptic overtones on the one side and extreme class prejudices on the other. While the outcome's never really in doubt thanks to our knowledge of how the historical events unfolded,Vargas Llosa's storytelling gifts are such that he manages to bring this strange, distant world alive with almost cinematic verve throughout the 921 pages of his book.

A bibliographical detour. While Vargas Llosa's storytelling wowed me (my only serious complaint was the introduction of a rape scene late in the novel that seemed complete unnecessary), I'd like to pause for a moment here to mention Euclides Da Cunha's 1902 Os Sertões: a Brazilian nonfiction classic (translated in English as Rebellion in the Backlands and in Spanish as Los sertones: Campaña de Canudos) that was the Peruvian's primary source for his novel. While it's not necessary to know anything about Rebellion in the Backlands to enjoy The War of the End of the World, I suspect that each book would complement the other for anyone interested in doing some comparative reading on the subject. The little that I've read of Da Cunha so far provides a dense, meticulous introduction to the geography and the people of Canudos that's almost completely missing from Vargas Llosa's version of the events, and the Brazilian himself has a sort of vestigial presence in The War of the End of the World in the form of the character, an unnamed nearsighted journalist, who accompanies the army on the last two expeditions against the backlanders. Unfortunately, I was so carried away by Vargas Llosa's prose that I was unable to complete my side-by-reading of Rebellion in the Backlands in time for this post.

Since both the history behind The War of the End of the World andthe journalist character fascinated me, it probably won't come as a suprise to find out that the intersection between reality and the representation of reality is one of the great themes of Vargas Llosa's work. Or, as one character puts it when discussing some of the rumors about the war, "the invented fantasy...is more credible than the true story" (468). And although the journalist is a perfect symbol of this myopic tension (how reliable is his testimony given the fact that he spends much of the final battle cowering in fear and unable to see after the loss of his glasses?), this is just part of a rich matrix that also integrates epic storytelling techniques within a realistic framework. Among a colorful cast of characters (the ex-slave Big João, a Scottish anarchist named Galileo Gall, the fierce Abbot João--a reformed killer once known as Satan João before falling under the Counselor's sway), one of my favorites is a tubercular circus dwarf who survives by singing the Carolingian-themed epics of Portuguese jongleurs. That a chanson de geste about Robert the Devil would have anything at all to do with a civil war in late 19th-century Brazil may surprise you; however, it's just another stirring example of Vargas Llosa's storytelling artistry in The War of the End of the World. Superb.

Gracias a Ever por recomendarme este libro con tanto entusiasmo y a Mario por prestarme la imagen de la novela con la tapa amarilla y por otra ayuda archivesca.//Thanks to Ever for recommending this book to me with such enthusiasm and to Mario for lending me the photo of the novel with the yellow cover and for other archival assistance.

miércoles, 23 de septiembre de 2009

I'll probably get around to posting about the rest of Gautier's My Fantoms at some point, but I wanted to pause for a moment here to sing the praises of its concluding chapter first. Although translator Richard Holmes insists on calling "The Poet" a "story" for reasons that are beyond me, Gautier's affectionate tribute to his lifelong friend (originally published simply as "Gérard de Nerval") is decidedly more factual than fictional. Gérard de Nerval's own life was apparently not so clearly defined in his mind, a type of fiction in its own right that was spent shuttling back and forth between the dream world and cold reality until he finally decided to hang himself one night on the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne. If the poet's tragic end clearly traumatized Gautier, who was tasked with identifying the body in the morgue, you, the 21st-century reader with multiple reading choices at hand, need have no such fears on your part. While the biographer's retrospectively aware of the many signs of madness that Nerval's friends were late to recognize "in those days of literary eccentricity" then in vogue in Paris (161), this doesn't stop him from illustrating Nerval's "otherness" with the choicest of anecdotes: the wonderful story about the big Renaissance bed that Nerval bought and restored in honor of his infatuation with a woman he was too timid to approach in person, the Frenchman's travels in Goethe's Germany and the "Mohammedan" Orient, the unforgettable day the poet innocently chose to walk a live lobster on a blue silk ribbon through the gardens of the Palais Royal. Gautier's also splendid at evoking an insider's picture of bohemian Paris (for example, the riots at one of Hugo's plays) that fans of the City of Light and/or writing about writers won't want to miss. In short, excellent reading for any of you tired of our own day and age's regard for generic but media-savvy authors who peddle their boring wares via blog tours and tweets on Twitter and the like. Source: Théophile Gautier (translated by Richard Holmes). My Fantoms. New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2008, 151-173. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia & Other Writings (Exact Change) with that lovely illustrationthat haunts me all the more because my French version of the novella from Le Livre de Poche is so unbearably ugly.

"Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?" he used to ask quietly, "or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad." There were a thousand other reasons, each one more ingenuous than the last.
--My Fantoms, 163

lunes, 14 de septiembre de 2009

The 2666 readalong that Claire and Steph put together has been so rewarding for so many of us that a number of the participants, including yours truly, have started openly bemoaning the impending end of Roberto Bolaño's 1100-page masterpiece. To help make up for that loss, Emily from Evening All Afternoonand I thought it might make sense to try to fill the void with yet another 1100-page doorstopper: Sigrid Undset's 1920-1922 Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which we'll be reading at a one book a month pace from October through December. You, the bloghopping connoisseur of contemporary fiction, are personally invited to read along with us. Might you be interested?

To help you decide, here are a few things you might want to consider. First, Undset's trilogy is both Nobel Prize-certified and absolutely wildly acclaimed on a certain online book dealer's customer review database. I don't put any particular stock in either of those things myself, but I'm very intrigued by the mix of this Norwegian author's fan base. Second, Kristin Lavransdatter has the reputation of an early 20th century classic that had fallen out of prestige for a while before starting to make its recent comeback. Also interesting. Perhaps even more importantly for me, Undset's trilogy is considered a foundational work in contemporary Scandinavian literature--a slice of the world literature pie often overlooked by comp lit fans and definitely hardly ever sampled by me. Tiina Nunnally's award-winning English translation is also supposed to be quite the big deal, but there's no shortage of versions of the work available to suit all tastes and pocketbooks.

Emily has a great entry about the trilogy, with more details on its specific literary claims to fame, over at her readalong post here. I won't bother to repeat those details, but suffice it to say that the main reason Emily and I wanted to propose another shared read was the great group of friends we met through the Bolaño readalong: friendly, insightful readers who made the readalong experience so much richer than it would have been otherwise. Plus, we thought that Claire and Steph deserved a break after all their organizational toils. Thankfully many of those same enthusiastic bloggers are continuing on with us here, and you--regardless of whether you maintain a blog or not, regardless of how casual your interest in literature is--are welcome to join in on the fun. I hope some of you will consider participating!

Logistics

October read, Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath

November read, Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

December read, Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

(All posts, whether reviews or mere impressions, should be shared around the end of each month, so that the other readers in the group can visit your blog and make comments. If you're running a little ahead or behind or just want to read along without posting anything, that's fine, too. Please note that Emily and I will be keeping a running list of participants on each of our blogs, so just let one or the other of us know if you'd like to join the readalong. P.S. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a huge crush on Emily's blog, so please check that out and those of the others in the group regardless of your interest in the readalong as a whole! )

Although there are all kinds of bad books, I think there are probably only two kinds of good ones: those that you want to hang on to forever, like 2666, and those that you only want to read to pass the time. This slim volume, written by Anagrama's founder and chief editor and himself a friend of Bolaño's, clearly falls into the second category based on its size alone: you can read it in less than an hour. However, it offers a personal look at one of the greats of contemporary literature. What you'll find inside are two speeches Herralde gave in honor of Bolaño following the writer's death, a few pages having to do with 2666's publishing history, and three excerpts from interviews that Herralde gave on the subject of his literary superstar. There are also various photos of the writer and the editor with friends (Ignacio Echevarría, Enrique Vila-Matas, and, in my favorite one, the young Bolaño with all his Mexican friends in the Parque Chapultepec [Chapultepec Park] in Mexico City in 1976) and a few of the covers of the international editions of Bolaño's works. It's a nice tribute. I'll leave you a little snippet below on Bolaño's favorite books to help flesh out this summary. (http://www.acantilado.es/)

I buy the majority of my Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish books at a Cambridge bookstore called Schoenhof's Foreign Books (photo above: 76A Mount Auburn Street/Cambridge, MA 02138). This basement bookstore actually isn't all that large (in fact, it only has one big room dedicated to literature and literary criticism and a second smaller room for dictionaries, grammar manuals, and other teaching aids), but for me it's a treasure trove because it specializes in foreign books in literally hundreds of languages. Among the 25 books at the very top of my current TBR list, I've bought all of the following from Schoenhof's: Bolaño's Nocturno de Chile (Anagrama), Cortázar's Rayuela (Cátedra), García Márquez' Cien años de soledad (Cátedra) y Noticia de un secuestro (Penguin Ediciones), Juan Goytisolo's Don Julián (Cátedra), Margaret Mazzantini's Non ti muovere (Mondadori), Ricardo Piglia's Plata quemada (Anagrama), and Francisco de Quevedo's La vida del buscón (Crítica). It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the last book I bought also came from Schoenhof's: a copy of the Poema de Fernán González from Castalia's "Odres Nuevos" ("New Wineskins") series. I love looking at the shelves full of books in black covers from Cátedra and those austere covers of medieval and renaissance works from Crítica (see the cover of the Buscón below). My only gripe with Schoenhof's is that their books sometimes aren't all that cheap. I suppose that this has to do with the fall of the dollar and high import taxes, but I often wonder why the same copy of Ricardo Piglia's Respiración artificial (Anagrama narrativas hispánicas) that I bought in Argentina for 39 Argentinean pesos (more or less the equivalent of $11 U.S.) could cost somewhere around $30 U.S. here. Weird.

In regards to books in English, I tend to find most of them at two other places in Cambridge: Harvard Book Store (photo below: 1256 Massachusetts Avenue/Cambridge, MA 02138) and the Harvard Coop (1400 Massachusetts Avenue./Cambridge, MA 02138). I prefer the former of the two because it's an independent and because it's located right across the street from my job. A good place to kill time leafing through the pages of the new arrivals. The Coop belongs to a big chain (Barnes and Noble), but it's a much better version than the other stores in the franchise (the majority of which I find to be big, impersonal bookstores without character oriented towards best sellers and the like) probably on account of Harvard Square's university and bibliophile-type clientele. I normally try to buy my English language books at the Harvard Book Store first, but I'll buy them at the Coop with no hesitation whatsoever if the other one doesn't have what I'm looking for. In fact, I like them both and the Coop has the added benefit of being much larger than its competitor (four floors instead of two). I have the following titles awaiting me from these two stores: Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World Classics), Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Oxford World Classics), The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Anchor Books), The Melancholy of Resistance byLaslo Krasznahorkai (New Directions), Lautréamont's Maldoror and Poems (Penguin Classics), Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (Penguin Classics), Melville's Moby-Dick (Penguin Classics), W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (The Modern Library), and Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics).

I get other books from the library (a theme for another day, but mine has an entire floor dedicated to books in Italian and Spanish and another floor set aside for French history and literature), and among those awaiting me right now are a thick edition of Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos y Los lanzallamas (Colección Archivos) and a copy of Eça de Queiroz' The Crime of Father Amaro (New Directions). Plus, two contemporary Spanish novels: Javier Marías' Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Anagrama) y Vila-Matas' El mal de Montano (also Anagrama, what a surprise). Last spring, I also bought about a dozen or so books in Argentina during a visit to my in-laws (my wife's from Argentina) among which Rodrigo Fresán's Mantra (Mondadori) and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's Radiografía de la pampa (Editorial Losada) stand out. And sometimes I buy books online when all else fails: I chose to get a hold of Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo (Punto de Lectura) and Da Cunha's Los sertones (Fondo de Cultura Económica) in this way because I couldn't find them at Schoenhof's and I didn't like the old, ugly and generally all beat-up library copies at hand. Too much information? Perhaps. Signs of a book addiction? Definitely. Happy reading to all of you!

martes, 8 de septiembre de 2009

I wasn't even aware of Penguin's multi-volume Great Journey series until recently, but stumbling upon a cache of these pamphlet-sized nuggets half-priced at Brattle Book Shop in Boston about a month or so ago now has to rank as one of my book-buying year's happiest surprises. The Humboldt title, dealing with his travels in Venezuela "in tropical heat" in 1800, is a superior introduction to the collection as a whole: an abridged version of 100 of the choicest pages culled from the German naturalist's 30-volume Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent that has whet my appetite for even more from the author. For a guy who's sometimes derided for having overlooked the people he encountered during his 1799-1804 travels in favor of long descriptions of the lush landscapes instead, Humboldt was a more than adequate travel companion for me here; the excerpts are full of trenchant observations about race relations in the Americas, for example, and the explorer's much more down to earth than you might expect given his full name and title and the inherent awkwardness of a situation in which an abolitionist man of science was occasionally forced to rely on slave labor to accomplish his geographical and scientific pursuits. The celebrated landscape descriptions are often fascinating as well, and passages like the one below show how nimbly Humboldt's ever inquisitive mind could move from the physical world to the world of larger truths despite his enthusiasm for the teeming New World wildlife. In other words, terribly entertaining stuff--even for someone like me who prefers to do most of his "exploring" with a coffee cup in hand! (http://www.penguin.com/)

"I confess that these often repeated scenes greatly appeal to me. The pleasure comes not solely from the curiosity a naturalist feels for the objects of his studies, but also to a feeling common to all men brought up in the customs of civilization. You find yourself in a new world, in a wild, untamed nature. Sometimes it is a jaguar, the beautiful American panther, on the banks; sometimes it is the hocco (Crax alector) with its black feathers and tufted head, slowly strolling along the sauso hedge. All kinds of animals appear, one after the other. 'Es como en el paraíso' ('It is like paradise') our old Indian pilot said. Everything here reminds you of that state of the ancient world revealed in venerable traditions about the innocence and happiness of all people; but when carefully observing the relationships between the animals you see how they avoid and fear each other. The golden age has ended. In this paradise of American jungles, as everywhere else, a long, sad experience has taught all living beings that gentleness is rarely linked to might." (Alexander von Humboldt, Jaguars & Electric Eels, 65-66)

It's now time for me to say goodbye to this chapter, but here are five more things I'd write about if I had more time (the page numbers are from the Spanish edition, and the translations are mine).

Bolaño's sense of humor. "'Father, there's a man doing his business in the church,' said the little old lady. The priest poked his head out from between the frayed curtains and searched for the stranger in the yellowish shadows, and then he left the confessional box and the woman with Indian features also left the confessional box and the three of them remained motionless looking at the stranger who groaned weakly and didn't stop urinating, wetting his pants and unleashing a river of urine that flowed towards the vestibule, confirming that the aisle, just as the priest feared, was alarmingly uneven." (453-454)

The date between Juan de Dios Martínez and Elvira Campos where the judicial witnesses a conversation that he can't hear between a narco and a musician (475-477). The reader gets to experience two conversations, one audible and one not, that take place at the very same time. Inspired.

The rhythm of the prose. Poetic repetition: "With regard to Florita Almada," begins one fragment (571). "With regard to the dead women of August 1995," begins the very next one (575). The juggling of multiple narrative threads: I love how Bolaño narrates professor Perla Beatriz Ochoterena's suicide, alternating her story with other fragments on other victims (646-649). It's a dizzying stylistic effect.

Lalo Cura (la locura = madness in Spanish, by the way), one of my favorite characters: "'Living in this desert,' thought Lalo Cura, while the car driven by Epifanio headed away from the vacant plot, 'is like living in the sea. The border between Sonora and Arizona is a group of ghostly or enchanted islands. The cities and the villages are ships. The desert is an unending sea. This is a good place for fish, above all the fish that live in the deepest holes, but not for men." (698)

Bolaño's gift for dialogue: "Kessler told the taxi driver to stop, that he wanted to get out and take a look. The taxi driver said "No, it's better not to, Boss,' that over here the life of a gringo wasn't worth too much. 'Do you think I was born yesterday?' Kessler demanded. The taxi driver didn't understand the expression and insisted that Kessler shouldn't get out of the car." (736)